I Almost Got Banned From Medium After Escaping Curation Jail
I was 8 hours away from a permanent ban without even knowing it
A little over a month ago, I was in the midst of a fun personal challenge on Medium.
It was an attempt at some light humor with the objective of getting a celebrity author on Medium to reply, highlight, or like any of these articles.
The rules were simple:
- Write one post per day about a subject relating to the celebrity
- Put a personal touch on how it related to myself
- Link and promote something from the celebrity in every article as a form of thanks or kudos
- Stop once that person had any sort of engagement with the articles
- Crack open the champagne!
Curation Jail
At the same time, I was also desperately researching Medium for a way to get out of the proverbial curation jail.
For those unaware of that term, here’s a thorough article on the subject:
After a lot of writing, a lot of posting, and way too many hours of research and discussion, I finally escaped!
My articles were now being manually reviewed by curators at Medium.com instead of being passed over by an algorithm automatically.
I was pretty ecstatic, to say the least, and couldn’t wait for the hundreds of pennies to start rolling in.
I had my coin wrappers ready for this moment.
In Pursuit of a Laugh
That little challenge of mine? Yea, I was on iteration #56 when I got out of curation jail.
56 days of researching a celebrity who turned out to be way more fascinating and intriguing than I had ever expected. It was a pretty fun project in the end!
I was also playing around with different ways to reach out to the person.
I confess I was getting a bit tired writing about a similar subject every single night for almost two months — I guess I got my wish in the end.
I tried looking at Twitter and seeing if I could reach the person there, or at least have them view one of my articles.
That didn’t work, their Twitter had shut down a year before.
Next, someone mentioned the idea of starting a publication to do it — but then I couldn’t post in any other publications, as I had been doing from time to time with these.
I settled on starting a sort of fan club, where I would include any willing participants at the bottom of every article, so it would send them a notification in the Medium platform.
I liked this idea as I now had about a dozen people following along and seemingly enjoying the journey and challenge.
FYI, apparently that is a no-no here on Medium.com!
Manual Review
Now came the fun part. Because of my other endeavors on the platform, curators were finally looking at my work!
What I didn’t realize was that they’d be looking at ALL of my work — including from the previous 3 months.
I suppose they wanted to check what the algorithm passed over previously.
Sadly, they didn’t decide to reevaluate any of my previous 150 articles for curation.
But they did have a closer look at this little challenge of mine.
Random Luck
On a random Friday night, I was at my favorite local watering hole waiting for a friend to arrive.
Bored and in a mostly empty bar, I decided to check through my email inboxes as I had the spare time.
The main ‘primary’ email had nothing much to peruse.
Out of pure lack-of-something-better-to-do-ness, I decided to rifle through the ‘social media’ and ‘promotions’ sections of my Gmail account.
And oh boy, am I glad I did.
There was a lovely little semi-personal email from Medium in the promotions folder! I thought for sure it had something good to say.
Was I curated? Was I featured? “Oh, this will be good,” I thought.
As the big orange pumpkin president would say, “WRONG.”
Someone at Medium decided, for whatever reason, that this light-hearted little challenge of mine was considered a severe form of harassment.
The kicker — they gave me 24 hours to delete all related articles and comments or be permanently banned.
No warning in Medium itself. No multiple emails. No auto-deletion and warnings were given.
Hell, this sole email was buried in my ‘promotions’ folder of all places.
I was not pleased, to say the least. Nor was I about to willingly give up 3.5 months of hard work on the platform.
So of course I complied and scrambled to delete all 56 articles and any comments I could find on the subject.
Happily, that seemed to satisfy them, as mentioned in their very cold, robotlike email stating: “Consider the matter closed.”
Scary Times at Ridgemedium High
I’m not ashamed to admit I took a while to get over the stress-spike resulting from this. I had put spent an incredible amount of hours over the previous few months on this new hobby of Medium.
The fact I could be banned without being properly notified was one thing. But for something that was considered humorous and without any previous complaint to me, was just shocking to me.
I’m glad that it was resolved in the end without any banning or suspension, but I sure was left with a foul taste in my mouth.
Medium never did tell me exactly what happened to trigger this — the 2 articles they specifically pointed out were also 2 months old.
I figure there’s one of three reasons they decided to send me that notice:
- The manual review of curators saw that and figured it was a violation
- A random person flagged one of the articles as non-compliant
- The celebrity in question didn’t like what I was doing and flagged it
As a silver lining, I sometimes think if #3 was the case, then I technically accomplished the challenge, albeit in a terrible way.
And if that is the case, then I am truly sorry that person felt offended by my work — that certainly wasn’t the intention of it.
If it’s #1 or #2, well — that just sucks.
I essentially wasted two months on a fun challenge that I had no idea it could be interpreted as being a serious violation of rules.
I mean, when you read articles by Rolli about all the drug sales and other problems on this platform, was this something that really warranted a complete ban if I didn’t see an email in my spam box within 24 hours?
Their platform — their rules — and of course we all need to abide by them.
I just can’t help feeling a bit slighted by this whole ordeal, even a month later.
If anyone was offended by the articles in question, I give my sincerest apologies as I desired the complete opposite as the outcome — to make people laugh and to help promote the celebrity.
An Open Letter to Medium Policy Setters
If anyone from Medium reads this, can you please take the time to relook at your banning policies.
If I hadn’t been randomly bored that evening, I would never have checked my ‘promotions’ folder and saw that I was about to be permanently driven out of your platform with no recourse.
As a former Head of Product in a multi-national company, I’m very familiar with the challenges of setting rules across platforms.
It’s not easy, but there’s always room for improvement.
Perhaps you could consider some of the following suggestions for improvement in this area, as not everyone deserves to be outright banned nor lumped in the same category as a methamphetamine pusher.
- Send warnings inside the Medium platform in addition to emailing
- Give multiple warnings with longer than 24 hours notice periods
- Freeze people’s accounts from taking any actions until they resolve the issue
- Delete or delist the articles in question automatically, instead of putting the onus on the violator
- Consider a simple system of warnings and suspensions before outright bans for some cases
Medium, I Love You
Just in case this article ruffles any feathers, know that I will not delete this article nor leave the platform anytime soon — on my own accord.
I was hesitating to write this article as I’m wary of potentially being on some Medium staff’s radar after getting an almost-ban.
But I wrote this with the thought of constructive criticism, so if any staff does end up reading this — I hope you can take this with a grain of salt —as I’m trying to help.
Medium truly is a great platform, but as with every startup, there are growing pains.
I’m looking forward to continuing the journey on this website, discovering more great work and authors, and hopefully not being banned for an unintended misstep.
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